‘Re­laxed’ Bolt says fi­nal track sea­son for the fans

Nine-time Olympic cham­pion Usain Bolt ded­i­cated what is set to be his last track sea­son to his fans, with the Ja­maican sprint star say­ing his train­ing regime was now “more re­laxed”.

How­ever, the 30-year-old in­sisted yes­ter­day that his will to win was undimmed. “It’s more re­laxed, me and my coach will dis­cuss, we’re go­ing to change my train­ing regime, dif­fer­ent things so it’s not go­ing to be as in­tense as the sea­sons be­fore,” Bolt said yes­ter­day ahead of the Lon­don pre­miere of ‘I am Bolt’, a doc­u­men­tary film chart­ing his ca­reer in the 18 months lead­ing into this year’s Rio Olympics.

Bolt, who is set to bring the cur­tain down on his bril­liant ca­reer at the 2017 World Ath­let­ics Cham­pi­onships in Lon­don in Au­gust, added: “It’s mainly be­cause my fans are..there’s a few peo­ple who are my friends, my close friends and a few other of my fans said that they re­ally never see me com­pet­ing live so I am giv­ing peo­ple op­por­tu­nity now to come and see me at my last world cham­pi­onships or maybe in Ja­maica, my last run in Ja­maica and stuff like that. “So it’s mainly for the fans this sea­son.” Nev­er­the­less, he added: “I never want to lose, in any way. Even a sim­ple board game I don’t want to lose so for me the fact that I say it’s for my fans, I still want to go out and com­pete at my best. But it’s not so much pres­sure as it is like for the past eight years where I have to con­sis­tently win.

“I know I have to win but for me it’s much more sim­pler, less stress­ful, less pres­sure so I am just train­ing hard as I al­ways do and go com­pete at my best as al­ways.”

At Rio, Bolt com­pleted the ‘triple triple’ by win­ning golds in the 100 me­tres, 200m and 4x100m re­lay, just as he had done at both the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games in Bei­jing and Lon­don re­spec­tively.

Bolt said he hoped the doc­u­men­tary would show just how hard he had worked to be­come one of the great­est sprint­ers of all time. “Most peo­ple say to me when they see me like: ‘Oh you make it look so easy’ but it’s not. So I wanted to make peo­ple see what I went through to get where I am at to­day,” he ex­plained.

Mean­while Bolt, who has often spo­ken of his de­sire to be­come a pro­fes­sional foot­baller, said he planned to do some train­ing with top Ger­man club Borus­sia Dort­mund.

Both Bolt and Dort­mund use kit made by Ger­many-based sports man­u­fac­tur­ing gi­ant Puma, who put the ath­lete and the club in touch with one an­other. “Why not?,” said Bolt on Mon­day. “It’s some­thing I have al­ways wanted to try and see if I were any good at, so at the end of the sea­son I will go there (Dort­mund) and do a lit­tle trial, not a trial but a lit­tle train­ing.” — AFP